The annual CHIRP Record Fair hits Chicago every April, and I’ve been volunteering at the Fair for four or five years by now. It’s always an incredibly interesting collection of used vinyl dealers, record labels/distros, crafters, poster artists, and live music. Held for the second year in a row at the Plumbers’ Union Hall in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood (near Union Park) all day Saturday and Sunday, the Fair has become the annual vinyl collecting event in Chicago. (Other record fairs in the area are bi-monthly.)

This year, I only made it for late Sunday afternoon, instead spending most of my weekend at a local ethnomusicology conference that I helped to organize. (On a side note, I almost expected half of the music nerds in town for the conference to show up at the Fair, but alas, I was pretty disappointed.) I arrived with $20 in my pocket, a plan to hit my favorite vendors for an hour or so, and then help load out to earn my volunteer cred. For just a short while of looking, I scored plenty for only $20!

• Bon Jovi, 7800° Fahrenheit (Polygram, 1985): It’s no secret that in my adulthood, I’ve gained a fondness for New Jersey artists that I wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to as a teenager growing up in North Jersey. Bon Jovi is one such artists, and their second full-length is a pretty good example of the major-label pap that I held in such disdain ten years on, opting instead for local (and long-forgotten) hardcore and pop/punk bands. While later records evidence a tunefulness that allows one to categorize Bon Jovi both as pop and metal (or, more easily, as pop-metal), 7800° marks a transition of sorts from the harder-edged metal of their youth (and self-titled debut) towards the more accessible Top-40 sound of their next two records (Slippery When Wet and New Jersey), and as such is somewhat underwhelming when compared with the rest of their discography. That said, there are still some pretty memorable singles here, notably “In and Out of Love,” “Only Lonely,” and “The Hardest Part is the Night.”
  
• Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow (RCA Victor, 1967): I subbed for a few weeks in a popular music class taught by a friend of mine, guest lecturing on Motown, 60s/70s rock, punk, and hip-hop. The textbook spent a lot of time talking about Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick as paradigmatic of the San Francisco psych-rock scene in the late 1960s, and I was surprised to find that I didn’t actually have this record in my collection already. Surrealistic Pillow is the Airplane’s second record, and their first with Slick; there are plenty of standout tracks, but the ones I’m sure you already know include “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” Trivia: according to the liner notes, Jerry Garcia served as the Airplane’s “spiritual advisor” during the writing and recording of this record.
• Nazareth, Hair of the Dog (A&M, 1975): Guns N Roses covered the title track of this record on their cover album, The Spaghetti Incident, and that’s the only reason I picked this record up in the first place. I was surprised to find that Nazareth also recorded the proto-power ballad “Love Hurts” for this record. How did I not know this before? From what I’ve read, Hair of the Dog is the only essential Nazareth record; now, I haven’t heard any others, but I’d be very surprised to learn that they managed to surpass this album. Both “Hair of the Dog” and “Love Hurts” are staples of classic rock radio, which was a stable of my car rides until very recently, when I realized that I could actually be an informed member of society if I listened to public radio in the car instead of AOR.
• Larry Norman, So Long Ago in the Garden (MGM, 1973): This is the third proper album by the proto-typical Jesus rocker. Larry Norman brought his troubled perspective on the Christian faith to the folk-rock that had nurtured him prior to his conversion; the result is music that spoke directly to the disaffected (and, some would add, spiritually searching) youth of the 60s and 70s that simultaneously laid the groundwork for the nascent CCM industry and challenged the roses’n’sunshine lyrical approach that has become standardized throughout the Christian popular music mainstream. Although this record is outshone by the two that bookend it (Only Visiting this Planet and In Another Land), it has the most controversial cover artwork of the three: that’s a picture of Norman’s naked torso super-imposed over a photo of a lion in the jungle. Unfit for Godly eyes!
• The 77’s, self-titled (Exit/Island, 1987): The 77’s self-titled major-label debut, their third full-length, finds them competently navigating the guitar rock/power-pop that flourished in the pop music underground of the 1980s. Their lyrics, while certainly not spiritually ambiguous, follow more in the honest/searching vein of Norman than in the praise/worship vein of popular 80s Christian acts. Again, it’s pretty clear that their main goal was to share their music with disaffected youth, providing an outlet for those struggling to square their faith with the disappointments and pleasures, failures and successes of daily life. I was actually pretty surprised, and totally excited to find a copy of this at the record fair; my intuition is that this is probably worth a great deal of money in the circles of those who collect Christian popular music.
• Stryper, Soldiers under Command (Enigma, 1985): If they’re known as anything anymore, Stryper is remembered as that hair-metal band that threw copies of the New Testament into the audience at their concerts. Relatively competent when compared to other hair-metal bands of the time, Stryper allegedly hid their faith from label A&R until they had a contract in hand. While the underground Christian metal scene was actually quite strong in the 1980s, Stryper is one of two bands (the other being Kings X) that actually succeeded in the secular pop market; in other words, they’re an anomaly from both the Christian and the secular perspective. Soldiers under Command was their second LP; and seemingly innocuous song titles gain a second meaning when interposed with their faith: “Together Forever,” “(Waiting for) A Love that’s Real,” “Surrender.” This vinyl copy is sealed, and I still haven’t opened it.
• Jimmy Swaggart, Jesus Will Outshine Them All (Jim Records, 1974): While artists like Larry Norman and Randy Stonehill were busily creating popular music that spoke to the Christian youth of the time, evangelist Jimmy Swaggart vehemently criticized such musicians for succumbing to worldly ways. His book Religious Rock n’ Roll – A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing reflected the perspective of many who believed that rock music was simply incompatible with Christianity. Fortunately, he did offer an alternative: as a recording artists, he issued many releases filled to the brim with white gospel praise and worship music, complete with organs and choirs, via his own Jim Records label. Revelations that he solicited sex from prostitutes arose in 1988, effectively destroying his evangelism career. Most Christians at the time believed that prostitution was simply incompatible with Christianity.

You know, when it rains, it pours. I’ve had a grocery bag full of CDs sitting in the trunk of my car for a few months, part of my ongoing CD downsizing project in which I gradually sell off the CDs I no longer listen to (all of which have already been ripped to my computer and backed up in triplicate) to fund my ever-increasing record purchasing habit. On my way down to Hyde Park on Tuesday, I decided to stop at Record Breakers, part of the Reggie’s rock complex in the South Loop, just a few blocks away from Chinatown in Chicago.

This store is literally in the middle of nowhere: I find it hard to believe that record collectors make it down here regularly, due to its location. My proof, however, is merely anecdotal: their stock doesn’t appear to turnover that frequently (this coming from an observer who’s only here every two or three months). At a place like Reckless, on the other hand, you can’t really expect to find the same (used) stock from week to week. I haven’t talked to the proprietors about this, however; in truth, I suspect it probably doesn’t matter all that much. Their lease can’t be that expensive, and they probably cover it with the on-premises liquor sales and concert tickets.

All that said, when I do come down here with a bag full of CDs, they usually end up taking about a third, and I walk out with some semi-decent records (especially things that I might not want to be seen purchasing at a hipper enclave…). This time was no exception, although it is rare that I end up with this high a ratio of Christian records. My one exciting find was the Fridge 12″. I know nothing about it—it’s not on the Sevens and Twelves compilation, neither of the songs are on any of the full-lengths—and I haven’t listened to it yet (this being another traveling week) so I can’t even tell you where it fits in their discography (other than the fact that its release date puts it in the Semaphore/Eph era). I’m forgoing descriptions on all of these—I simply don’t have the time to go through them, but I did want to get the list out there. I’ll be happy to provide an update to interested parties, just comment away.

• Altar Boys, Soul Desire (Big Time, 1987)
• The DeGarmo & Key Band, Straight On (Lamb & Lion, 1979)
• Fridge, Kinoshita Terasaka (Go Beat, 1998)
• The Hal Al Shedad, Textures of Tomorrow (Troubleman Unlimited, 2004)
• Rez Band, Hostage (Sparrow, 1984)
• Rez Band, Live Bootleg (Sparrow, 1984)
• 2nd Chapter of Acts, Rejoice (Sparrow, 1981)

[This is another Friday in which I'm traveling, and thus unable to spin my CHIRP radio show and post the playlist here for your enjoyment. Instead, as last time, I'm posting a conference paper from last year on record collecting. I spent a lot of time last year working on this project, culminating (for now) in this two conference presentations. Feedback was great, and I plan on corralling everything into an article for publication in the very near future. For now, though, you'll have to wade through these presentations and let me know how close to the mark I'm getting. Anecdotal experience and feedback is always welcome!]

Preamble / By Way of Introduction

This afternoon, I’m presenting a component of my research into vinyl record fairs and record collecting. Existing discourse on record collecting, with a few notable exceptions, focuses on profiling record collectors.[1] Collectors are typically presented as anti-social, obsessive-compulsive cultural curators—what popular music scholar Roy Shuker has called the High Fidelity stereotype, after the popular novel by Nick Hornby (and film by Stephen Frears, starring John Cusack).[2] We repeatedly learn about collectors’ goals, reasons for preferring records over other media, and the shocking extremes to which collectors go for their collections. What these profiles never fully comment upon, however, is what the phenomenon of record collecting as a whole contributes to our society’s broader understanding and usage of music recordings. Indeed, the question “Why do people collect records?” I find to be unsatisfying, if not because the answers are simple then because there are simply too many of them to be useful for a broader understanding of the forces at work.

Instead, I’m interested in what we can learn about music recordings as commodities in contemporary Western society through studying record circulation: that is, the buying, collecting, and selling of records. What types of value and capital inform the exchange of music recordings? To what degree are these processes of exchange dependent upon the lived experiences, emotional lives, and individual interactions of and between individuals? And finally, in what ways can these subjectivities inform responsible research into musical cultures and communities?

In this presentation, I will focus on the forces that inform the moment of exchange itself—that is, the moment when record collectors pay record fair dealers actual money for physical records. The Fugazi refrain from which this paper’s title is taken criticizes contemporary consumption practices as subverting individuality in favor of socio-cultural conformity, encouraging me to look more closely at the role of agency in consumption. My proposal, drawing from Arjun Appadurai’s concept of commodity value,[3] is that the moment of exchange is structured and disciplined by a broad confluence of mutable values that differ from collector to collector, from dealer to dealer, from record to record, and potentially from moment to moment, depending on individual life circumstances, expectations, business and collecting philosophies, and cultural, economic, and social capital. This work is based on ethnographic research at Chicago-area record fairs conducted over the last three years, interviews with record fair dealers, organizers, and collectors, and a survey of 30 vendors and 65 collectors at a record fair in April, 2009.

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A couple days after visiting Grimey’s, I found myself with a few hours to kill in Nashville’s East End. This is an up-and-coming neighborhood with plenty of hip bars and restaurants. After hanging out with a local acquaintance for lunch, he suggested I visit The Groove for some quality record shopping, just around the corner from where we ate and chatted. Unlike at Grimey’s, I didn’t strike up any random conversations, but I did immerse myself in their used vinyl stock while Explosions in the Sky loudly blasted over the store’s stereo. One thing I noticed is that they had a pretty large rack devoted to local music—something I’d really like to see more of in Chicago. I ended up with a pretty varied haul at a very reasonable price.

• Andraé Crouch & the Disciples, The Best Of (Lexicon/Light, 1975): In my research on Christian popular music, Crouch keeps coming up as a counter-example to all the white rock and pop that was hitting the Christian fringe culture in the 1970s. His take on gospel is heavily influence by contemporary secular soul and R&B, and he really worked on implementing pop songwriting and production techniques with the more traditional take on gospel that had been present on the radio and in the African-American church for the previous decades. I’ve been seeing various full-lengths in my record browsing recently, but never know where to start; thus, The Best Of will serve as my introduction. One interesting note is the disparity in dates while looking up Crouch on Allmusic: the record I bought lists 1975 as the copyright year; Allmusic suggests that Crouch didn’t start recording albums until 1977; a 1993 greatest hits collection has the same cover art and tracklist as the double LP that I bought. It’s not really clear to me at all when this collection was actually compiled and released.
• Morton Gould, More Jungle Drums (RCA, 1964): In addition to the release of ethnomusicological field recordings on Folkways and Smithsonian in the 1950s and 1960s, the “world light”/exotica/bachelor pad/lounge issues of the 1960s and 1970s found the major labels dabbling in exoticising the unknown. Belly dance records were one very visible (and memorable!) exotica product, but another option was to have well-known classical artists provide their name to collections of exotic music. Gould, an American composer sometimes relegated to the “popular” margins of art music, follows up his 1957 Jungle Drums issue with a second attempt at “capturing the very essence of the Latin musical temperament.” Side 2 is entirely devoted to works by Ernesto Lecuona.
• Joan of Arc, How Memory Works (Jade Tree, 1998): Here’s an example of the regionalism I was talking about in my previous post: I have not seen either of the first two Joan of Arc records on vinyl in Chicago for under $10, but I picked this one up for $7.99. I was pretty thrilled to find this, as it brings back strong memories of really opening up to what indie rock can be as I grasped at just about anything non-major label to listen to in college. I remember asking the owner of Play It Again, the indie record store near college where I ended up working in 2000-01, what he knew about Joan of Arc. He said, “Oh yeah, they’re emo.” And there’s little ol’ me, suddenly into Rainer Maria and The Promise Ring, immediately sold on Joan of Arc. Of course, later releases would find Kinsella and his revolving cast of collaborators move further away into non-standard structures and soundscapes on later records—almost maddingly so—but on this second album, they have some pretty memorable songs. In particular, “Gin & Platonic,” “This Life Cumulative,” and “God Bless America” are standouts for me.
• New End Original, Thriller (Jade Tree, 2001): New End Original was something of a supergroup, albeit a very little-known one: Jonah Matranga (Far, Onelinedrawing) on vocals/guitar, Norman Arenas (Shelter, Texas is the Reason) on guitar, Scott Winegard (Texas is the Reason) on bass, and Charlie Walker (Split Lip, Chamberlain) on drums. The issued a single (for “Lukewarm”) and a full-length on Jade Tree before disbanding. Listening to it again almost a decade later, Thriller never really rises above the sentimental clichés of emo-pop, but there’s still something arresting about Matranga’s voice. This is a double LP on marbled sky blue vinyl. The record definitely fits Jade Tree’s late 90s/early 00s sound, as well as their design M.O.: comparing this sleeve to the Joan of Arc on right above, or pretty much anything from this era (The Promise Ring, Jets to Brazil, the Cap’n Jazz anthology) reveals a pretty obvious design identity for the label that carried a very particular and recognizable emo torch for a good three or four years. One side note: when saying this bands name aloud, sometimes it sounds like New And Original; lest they be accused of arrogance born of a simple pronunciation misunderstanding, the band made buttons that read “E Not A.” It’s a funny joke, but one that takes too much explaining to actually work.
• Tesla, The Great Radio Controversy (Geffen, 1989): If anyone remembers Tesla at all, they remember the acoustic version of Five Man Electrical Jam’s “Sings” on the acoustic concert album Five Man Acoustical Jam (1990). If you were to dig further, however, you’d find a band carrying rock’s blues-based, working-class/blue collar roots of the 1970s well into the glam rock era of the late 1980s. In middle school, I really dug “Signs,” and an older friend of mine from band dubbed their other cassettes for me to listen to. The first two records in particular—1986’s Mechanical Resonance, followed by Radio—have some amazing songs on them. In particular, I really like “Lady Luck,” “Lazy Days, Crazy Nights” (which actually doesn’t stray too far from L.A. glam rock hedonism), and “The Way It Is.” Radio also features the epic crowd pleaser Love Song. This purchase is actually less about nostalgia, actually, than it is an inside joke with friends of ours who bought a Tesla band T-shirt for their toddler last year. I have yet to play them the actual record. Strangely enough, this band is still touring: they played Chicago the week before I bought this record in Nashville.

I visited Nashville the first week of March. This was my second such research trip, crammed with trips to the archives of the Center for Popular Music and interviews with various music industry professionals. Like my first trip in December, however, I did find time to go out record shopping—this was actually the first batch of vinyl I’ve bought in 2010, strangely enough. As soon as I walked into Grimey’s and started flipping through the recent jazz acquisitions, one of the buyers (Doyle) recognized my hat and started talking to me. I was wearing a baseball cap from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that had an image of a 45 insert embroidered into the front. (This is actually the second such hat I’ve had; Liana ordered it for me from the Rock Hall for Christmas after I lost the original faded one somewhere in Acapulco.) Doyle has the same cap, and just used that as an intro into a conversation.

I’m always interested in talking about records, and because of my research into vinyl collecting, I’m also interested in hearing lots of different perspectives on the so-called vinyl resurgence. He was on his way out, but took some time to explain what made his store different from others. Essentially, while many stores unload their best stock directly on eBay for a substantial profit (Doyle specifically mentioned Great Escape), Doyle feels that this practice deprives the regular, loyal in-store customers from some sweet deals. In fact, he claims that he’s had loyal customers of other stores defect to Grimey’s because of his focus on the bricks-and-mortar side. He wants Grimey’s to cater to their Nashville customers, serving as a locus of the vinyl and music community—their substantial in-store appearances and their downstairs music venue The Basement helps in this regard, as well. Doyle says that if a record sits in the store for a few weeks and doesn’t sell, he’ll make it available online, but that he hardly ever puts records up for online sale immediately: in-store customers always get first crack. He also talked a little bit about how Nashville is a great location for his store: because the city serves as a center of the recording industry, it attracts a lot of different people who are really into music. The indirect effect—at least for the secondary vinyl market—is that the availability and selection of used vinyl is incredibly diverse, and Doyle gets a lot of records through the store that have an appeal to many different tastes; he has customers that come in regularly from out-of-town/state because they know they can find stuff here that isn’t easily available at home.

We talked a bit about the vinyl resurgence, and I heard a lot from him that I’ve heard from employees at Reckless in Chicago: namely, that the secondary market for used vinyl records has seen a considerable increase in both the number of customers buying records and the amount of money they’re willing to spend on records. Led Zeppelin seems to be everyone’s favorite example, but the anecdotal truth is indicative of a common experience: Led Zep records that I was purchasing for a quarter apiece in the mid ’90s, fifteen years ago, are selling for $10 and up these days. I told him about the Sound Opinions episode on vinyl sales at Reckless, Amoeba (in L.A. and the San Francisco Bay area), and Waterloo (in Austin), and how the striking consensus among those three stores is that vinyl sales appears to essentially be saving their businesses. Funny thing, though: he had a lot of respect for Dusty Groove in Chicago, but my experience with that store is that the bulk of their quality used stuff goes direct to online sales—exactly the sort of thing that he’s attempting to correct with Grimey’s.

Anyway, all of this talk was a prelude to a satisfying hour or so browsing the stacks there. Here’s what I picked up that Friday afternoon:

• Georgie James, Places (Saddle Creek, 2007): This was actually one of my favorite albums from 2007. The duo features John Davis (former drummer for D.C. post-punk stalwarts Q And Not U) and singer/songwriter Laura Burhenn. (Note: “Georgie James” isn’t an actual person.) I saw them play at Schubas in 2007, and really dug the blend of politically conscious observation with the harmonies and easy pop—this band is definitely not as angular as Davis’s former band, and that’s surprisingly refreshing. Sadly, they’re now on hiatus, as Davis has a new solo project named Title Tracks. Anyway, Grimey’s had a sealed copy of this record for $10, which is a pretty good deal for a record I don’t own yet know I already like a lot.
• Gogogo Airheart, self-titled (GSL, 2001 [1997]): All I knew about this band is that they were a post-hardcore band out of San Diego, members of whom went on to play in Tristeza. After digging around, it looks like their first (self-titled) album, originally issued in 1997, was reissued by GSL in 2001 (and again in 2003). I’m not a huge pressing nerd, so it doesn’t really matter to me which version I picked up—although I should note that the LP I bought at Grimey’s has a different sleeve than any of the images I’ve seen online (and this isn’t it). The music is much more experimental that I expected, somewhat droney, I could picture Liars listening to them a lot before recording their last two or three records. None of the lush layering of Tristeza’s first two records is apparent, but that’s because none of the personal from this record actually ended up in Tristeza. Some more digging reveals that Jimmy LaValle was in Gogogo Airheart from 1999 on (and didn’t record this first album), at the same time he was in Tristeza and starting The Album Leaf as well. I listened to this record for the first time while mopping the living room on a Thursday morning, and I must opine that it’s not ideal apartment-cleaning music.
• 2nd Chapter of Acts / Phil Keaggy / David, How the West Was One (Myrrh, 1977): All three of these artists were rather well-known in the early Christian rock scene in the 1970s. This triple-record set is a live album, with the following description on the back of the sleeve: “This album represents the merging together of three musical parts of the Lord’s ministering body… During the summer of 1977 the Lord used the combined gifts of these ministries to help unite His body in eighteen cities in the western U.S.” Myrrh was the division of Word records that focused exclusively on contemporary music for a young Christian audience. The front of the sleeve uses the same image as this CD reissue, although the layout is slightly different.
• Bruce Springsteen, Magic (Columbia, 2007): This is his first record with the E Street Band since 2002’s The Rising, which was his first with E Street since 1987’s Tunnel of Love. To me there’s nothing really noteworthy about this album, I mainly bought it to fill in one of the gaps of my Springsteen vinyl collection. One interesting note: both the CD and LP were released in October 2007; this is significant because the major labels didn’t really embark on issuing and reissuing vinyl until about six months later, as the vinyl resurgence didn’t hit the mainstream public consciousness until 2008. It would be difficult to claim that the LP issue of Magic is an attempt at selling to some of the new vinyl market—major labels aren’t exactly known for their prescience—so instead it seems likely that there was already a sizable interest in vinyl among the rabid Springsteen fan contingent, and that Columbia knew this and explicitly released the vinyl specifically for them. I wonder how large this vinyl pressing actually was?
• Urban Verbs, Early Damage (Warner Bros., 1981): Urban Verbs were a completely underwhelming new wave group out of D.C. at exactly the wrong moment. All of the new-wave bands were in New York at the time, while D.C. had become the epicenter of hardcore as the New York punks shed the music and lifestyle as quickly as they had picked up the fashion. They had two albums before being dropped by Warner: 1980’s self-titled debut, and this 1981 issue. I already had the first one, now I have the complete collection. For the life of me, I cannot remember where I heard about this band, or why I even care. They’re really not that great at all.
• Various Artists, Phil Spector’s Christmas Album (CBS, 1981 [1963]): I don’t know anything about this record, other than Andy Cirzan (Jam Productions) mentioned it as one of the best Christmas albums ever released on his 2009 annual Christmas Spectacular episode at Sound Opinions. From scanning the tracklist, the single clearly notable song is Darlene Love’s recording of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” a de facto standard of every Christmas compilation playing in every mall across American in November and December (and quite a few movies as well). I probably won’t actually listen to this until the 2010 holiday season rolls around in 9 months.

[Normally, my Friday posts consists of playlists from my weekly CHIRP radio show. However, I'm traveling a couple of times in March, and a sub is taking over my regular shift those two weeks. So instead of a Friday playlist post, during the two weeks that I'm traveling I'll be posting the papers that I delivered on record collecting and the vinyl resurgence at two separate conferences last year. The first of these papers was presented at MIDSEM 2009 in Minneapolis.]

Preamble / By Way of Introduction

This paper represents a component of my research into vinyl record fairs and vinyl record collecting, work that has been ongoing for close to three years now. I was first drawn to record fairs as a burgeoning collector, but my research interest in records has grown beyond the phenomenological aspects of the consumption and collecting of musical recordings. Indeed, the question “Why do people collect records?” I find to be unsatisfying, if not because the answers are simple then because there are simply too many of them to be useful for a broader understanding of the forces at work.

Instead, I’m interested in what we can learn about music recordings as commodities in contemporary Western society through the study of record circulation; that is, the buying, selling, and collecting of records. What types of value and capital inform the exchange of musical recordings? To what degree are these processes of exchange dependent upon the subjective lived experiences, emotional lives, and individual interactions of and between individuals? And finally, in what ways can these subjectivities inform responsible research into musical cultures and communities?

This morning I will focus specifically on the experiences of record dealers—the collectors concerned with finding that mythical “compilation of every good song ever done by anybody” alluded to by the band LCD Soundsystem will have to wait patiently for the next conference—and my proposal, drawing from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of commodity value, is that the exchange of records at record fairs is structured and disciplined by a broad confluence of mutable values, which differ from record to record and from dealer to dealer depending on their individual circumstances, their expectations of their customers, and their business philosophies. My findings are based on ethnographic research at Chicago-area record fairs conducted over the last three years, a number of interviews with record fair dealers and organizers, and a survey of 30 vendors at a record fair in April, 2009.

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Sadly, record store closings have become somewhat common place, de rigueur, and even banal in the last few years. So many have closed, and so frequently have been the closings, that it’s practically a non-event. Observers greet these closings with clearly ambivalent messages: on the one hand, they bemoan the society that treats its history, community, and cultural products as ephemera, easily replaced by the next new thing(s). On the other hand, they treat these closures as an inevitable result of changes in the recording industry and the overall poor economy, ultimately placing the responsibility for failure not on society at large but at the feet of the entrepreneurs who fail to change their businesses (and business plans) as needed to reflect the new realities of distributing music in the 21st century. After all, if behemoths like Virgin and Tower couldn’t survive and pulled the plug even before the economy crashed, how can independent stores with much smaller capital bases expect to survive today?

[As an aside, I should note that part of the solution may lie in the current vinyl resurgence—over two years strong now—which has, to a large degree, helped keep independent record stores afloat. Patrick McGeehan's feature in the NYTimes in December is only one of many mass media articles to outline this broad cultural phenomenon in the last couple years; the Sound Opinions podcast episode on Record Store Day last April presents first-hand perspectives from three stores around the country. I could go on at length discussing the vinyl resurgence and its responses (see, e.g., Pitchfork's recent feature on cassette culture as a potential response to both digital and vinyl media), but will have to wait until a later post to do so.]

That argument—the question of how to healthily balance a reverence for the past with a respect for the present and an eye towards the future—is a rather large issue that many different industries, business people, politicians, and laypeople struggle with daily. It’s also an argument too incredibly nuanced to discuss with any sort of thoroughness in a single blog post, but that’s not what I’m concerned about. I think that in this type of public discussion, it’s the discourse itself that’s powerful, that helps both individuals and institutions outline their opinions and responses, that engages people in something larger than themselves in an age where myopic narcissism is celebrated.

All that said, it seems strange to me that the closing of yet another record store—Dr. Wax in Hyde Park, Chicago—would go nearly unnoticed by either the mainstream Chicago press or the various cultural blogs, mailing lists, and Twitter feeds that provide an alternative source of news. The Chicago Maroon—the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, now only published online—reported on the closing on January 26, and again on February 9. The Metromix blog picked up the story on February 17; and other sites have also spilled some virtual ink on the imminent closing: Soul Tracks and The Root, for example—but there’s been nary a post or tweet from some of the larger news sources in Chicago. It’s not that the papers and blogs don’t care about record store closings; after all, these stories provide some balance to the vinyl trend features that have littered the mass media in the last couple years: for example, the impending closing of Metal Haven has sparked a number of online eulogies—see, for example, Miles Raymer’s take over at the Chicago Reader—but that store serves a decidedly different clientele in a decidedly different neighborhood.

In a week when Time Out Chicago, arguably one of the loudest and most prevalent alternative current events voices in Chicago, focuses an entire issue and week’s worth of tweets to Hyde Park—and in a culture where music journalists/nerds/writers need little excuse to simultaneously lament and celebrate yet another record store closing—I just find it incredibly insulting that this story has been all but ignored. I don’t pretend to know why this is, but I’m sure the complex web of shortened attention spans, increased responsibilities, informational overload, and selective hearing/reading that we all confront every day is, in this case, further complicated (and, I would add, problematized) by racial issues: Dr. Wax’s Hyde Park location primarily sells black music—and not the kind that the hipsters enjoy digging up at, say, Dusty Groove in Wicker Park—and while Hyde Park is a relatively diverse neighborhood by Chicago standards, its location on the South Side (surrounded by many prominent minority neighborhoods) separates it from the center of Chicago’s Downtown and North Side cultural life.

The internet isn’t democratic, of course—this is a fact that many of us know intuitively—both in terms of the mediators/gatekeepers who decide which stories and events are broadcast, and in terms of which laypeople have regular internet access and enough disposable time to spend pushing their own agendas and interests. Indeed, as the internet has gradually corporatized over the last decade, the barrier for success has risen, and it has arguably become less democratic. All we have left, then, is our own discourse—not a weak tool, that, but one that we should wield responsibly. Those of us who have grown up in the information age  (and are sometimes justifiably derided as self-interested hipsters) may see ourselves as incredibly open-minded and accepting, but the absence of the Dr. Wax story in our own media is, in itself, a story of our own willful ignorance, disinterest, and apathy. For shame, Chicago interwebs, for shame.